


The Unfixed Star

by KriegsaffeNo9



Category: She-Ra and the Princesses of Power (2018)
Genre: Blood Drinking, Blood and Violence, Gen, Headcanon, Secret Origins, Torture, Unsubtle symbolism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-21
Updated: 2019-01-21
Packaged: 2019-10-14 00:46:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,104
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17498444
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KriegsaffeNo9/pseuds/KriegsaffeNo9
Summary: Writing challenge: "Separate Ways"In a quiet moment, Angella reflects on the start of her rebellion against Hordak.





	The Unfixed Star

When Angella was afraid, the taste of adrenaline--raw and metallic, like a coin in her mouth--reminded her of the Fright Zone. In those early days the air smelled like adrenaline tasted.

When the invasion began, the Fright Zone planted its roots in a scar on the surface of Etheria, a patch of dead earth where some great act of eldritch hypermathematics had rotated the planet from third-dimensional space into Despondos, the vacant house of the Elder Gods. The dead soil seethed with seventh-dimensional micro-constructs and the wailing energies of despair; the carcinoma of the Fright Zone took root and bloomed.

She remembered those early days all too well. The subjugation had begun quite humbly; Hordak had been allotted enough resources by Horde Prime to prove his worthiness and no more. It would be some time before he grew strong enough to threaten the planet in its totality.

The first attacks had been simple smash-and-grab affairs, bringing slaves and warm bodies into the Horde. Kingdoms brutish and simple enough to bully into submission folded not long after a simple display of force led by one of the Horde's great horrors--Wrap Trap, Calix, Light Bringer, Rattlor. The Horde grew steadily, and the Fright Zone grew in turn.

What had turned her heart, then? She had been so numb. A few thousand dead or disappeared was nothing. She had her affairs and promises to keep. She was divine, in service to divinity. What was pain to small living creatures compared to the eternal holiness of the Lord God?

It troubled her to realize there may not have been one event, one great turning. She had simply changed her mind after years of the Horde's grasp slowly closing around the neck of Etheria. There had been a time when she didn't care, and then a time she did. Etheria had once been just another world peopled by things that would grow and writhe in pain and die unmourned, the just sorted from the unjust by the filter of death. One morning, apropos of nothing, she woke to a moonrise and saw a world peopled by things that were afraid of losing their home, where the just and unjust alike struggled to draw another breath and live another day.

It was a change in perspective she found untenable with her position in the ranks of Heaven. And so she made a change.

Back then, the Fright Zone had only been a line of factories and an internment facility forming a fence of buildings around its core, where Hordak had first consecrated the planet to the Horde. A tree lined with grasping limbs--limbs that would choke a man that strayed too close--marked the entrance; false tunnels led to the maw of a manibus dragon or the clutch of a hidden earth elemental or a simple oubliette.

Angella walked past the tree, which shied from her; she felt the earth elemental stir beneath her feet and stay its hand; she saw the eyes of the manibus glint in darkness, and it let her pass. She descended into the heart of the Fright Zone.

She was divine, and the Fright Zone was young, and she was naive enough to be certain she could make a difference.  
She progressed through winding tunnels until at last she entered the court of Hordak. Hordak's throne, she had heard, was now set far above the rest of the Fright Zone; as the Horde grew in the intervening centuries, its cancer had metastasized from the depths to the heavens. Back then it had been nested in the bough of the earth. It was warm, the walls pulsing with biomechanical growth. A womb, or a stomach.

She would never forget Hordak as he was then... surely, as he would be even now, if his cybernetics had not been enhanced over time. An undead thing like him would be resistant to change.  
His eyes glinted in the dim light, narrowing as she approached, her staff in hand, her wings spread, her radiance burning.

"It's not like you to arrive unannounced," Hordak said. "Why do you disturb my reverie, Light Bringer?"

She spread all six of her wings, two fragile, translucent and crystaline, four vast and bristling with wine-red feathers. Her hair was the color of sunset. Her skin, the color of roses.

"I am yours no longer, Hordak," she said, leveling her bladed staff at his head. "You are a wicked thing and must be purged from reality in penance for the pain you have brought."

Hordak sighed. "I cannot be wicked, Light Bringer. My will is holy. My writ is the law of the universe. What lives is evidence of my mercy. What dies is evidence of my power. Therefore you have nothing to rebel against."

She responded by lancing him with firebolts. He responded by unfolding himself into a more combat-ready form. The battle began, and for hours they traded blows that tore open the guts of the Fright Zone, fire and steel and sorcery shredding the place.

She lost. Badly.

At the end of the day, bound by powerful grasping limbs, she was escorted into Hordak's personal transport, along with several Horde drones and his most trusted Force Captains. The craft flew out over Brightmoon Forest; its lower levels slid free of the rest of the craft, herself and Hordak and his minions exposed to the winter evening. Her aching body was rasped by the dry, icy wind.

"Light Bringer, you have hurt me," Hordak said. And he seemed to mean it.

"You've hurt this world far worse," she said.

He stepped forward. "The world bleeds only at my say. It hurts only because I know it needs to hurt. You have killed something that cannot be replaced." He touched her chin and she jerked her head away from his touch. "Love."

"It was never love," she said. "It was ownership."

"Yes," he said. "You were mine. You were beautiful. But now my morning star has come unfixed from the heavens." He bared his fangs, and she knew what was coming, and she could not escape it.

Hordak drank deep of her blood. It felt good to be drunk from. It was all chemical, of course, some drug injected to pacify his prey. She squirmed in his grasp, her body aflame, her agonized head growing yet dizzier as she emptied into his throat.

He closed her wounds. She heard his arm change shape; she heard a faint whirring. He stepped behind her, took hold of one of her wings, and pressed a vibroblade against the joint where it met her back.

He sawed her wing, slowly, with care to carve away even the stump of it. It was not wholly severed, she felt; it clung to her back by tendons, attached only by virtue of the cables keeping her wings bound.

She felt her connection to holiness bleed away.

He repeated the process with all of her great wings. Some days she remembered being silent; some days she remembered whimpering; some days she remembered sobbing, begging to be left whole. She couldn't tell what was the true memory and what had been a nightmare. Perhaps they were all memories.

He stood in front of her once more once he had mutilated the holiness out of her. "My morning star has come unfixed," he said. "And so she falls."

The floor below her fell away, the cables released. In pain, with a single pair of wings to carry her, she plummeted. Her wings fell away, one by one.

[She remembered a rain of feathers.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Tdlg2JXuaQ)

So much of that day, if it was just a day, was a haze of agony and fear and the cold realization that her life as it had been for so long was simply done. It was no longer possible to tell her memories from her dreams, imaginings, the way that day cast a shadow over the rest of her life.

She fell forever, crashing through the treeline, her body scourged by branches and leaves, and she fell into a sea of dead leaves and old bones and for a time she surely must have died.

* * *

There was a time where she was neither alive nor dead. It could have been a day or two; it could have been weeks.

She didn't know how she had been found. Maybe she'd been told during her recuperation but lost the answer to pain and despair. If her memory of her younger days was blurred with memory and nightmare, this time had been all but erased.

However it happened, in time she realized she was in the small hut of a pink-skinned, gray-haired crone, nested in a bed well-stuffed with down feathers. She didn't remember her name, only that she had asked no questions and had an ample supply of questionable stew, excellent bread, and powerful, sense-cleansing alcohol. Angella had availed herself of all of them.

At some point the winter drew to an end, and the crone helped Angella up and out of her hut and into the late-winter, pre-spring haze of the forest.

That she remembered with clarity. The biting, frosty breeze, the warm sun, green triumphantly cutting through the last of the frost. And the smell--she realized then how choking the smell of that hut had been.

And she was bound there for weeks more, regaining the strength in her last pair of wings.

These were protective wings. They slid in place over her stronger wings to keep her feathers dry and preened. They helped with maneuvering, they could certainly get her in the air under her own power, but they were... meager. Lessened.

One day, cleaning herself in a river, she saw her reflection and realized just how far she had fallen.

Her skin had blanched pink; her hair faded to a paler shade than her skin, save locks further down her head, which had stained purple, like a bruise. Her wings were no longer crystal, but faintly pink, as if all the blood vessels within had burst.

She had been majestic and she had been powerful and she had been one with the divine. Now she was a sad pink thing sharing a hovel with a drunken crone who talked to her folding fan.

The old woman found her kneeling in the shallows, staring at her reflection and sobbing like a child. She wished she remembered more about her, but she remembered what the old woman said to her.

"Oh, sweet little birdie, why are you sad?"

"I'm not a bird," Angella said. "I'm not even a... a filth-eating fly. Once I was an angel, crimson and burning with the flames of Creation. And now I've been stripped of everything that made me holy and all that I am is a beast of sin... a demon. I should be dead..."

The old woman had put her hand between her shoulders, between her remaining wings. "Angels, _feh_. Never done anybody any good. Up there, twiddling their thumbs, taking credit for the good people do. You can do real good down here, you know, not on some jerk's shoulder. Whoever kicked you out did you a favor."

It was maybe the worst thing to say to her at the time, but at the time she had been so shocked by what she said it had arrested the sorrow in her heart.

"The man I loved did this to me. The man who gave me my power."

The old woman spit. "Oh, did he. I bet he told you that all the time. 'Ooh, you're so weak and helpless without me.' You had the power all along, birdie. All he did was trick you into thinking it was his instead."

"...my wings... he took away..."

"Who needs that many wings, anyway? The birds get along just fine. The bees don't, but... they're very self-conscious about that. Don't tell anybody but I hear that they're not even supposed to be able to fly..."

Angella met the gaze of her reflection.

"Say it with me, birdie. 'I have the power.'"

Silence.

"That was an order, birdie."

Angella took a deep breath and said, softly, " _I have the power_."

"There you go! Old trick from the old country. Not really a trick, of course! But it does help with the trick that jerk pulled on you."

She bathed herself, and in her head, repeated the old woman's trick again and again and again 'til it felt like something she could say and mean it.

* * *

When spring began in earnest, she flew away. She hoped that her goodbyes were sincere and plentiful.


End file.
